I grew up reading Asimov's robot stories and knew I wanted to work on artificial intelligence growing up. I realized when I got to college that computer vision

I grew up reading Asimov's robot stories and knew I wanted to work on artificial intelligence growing up. I realized when I got to college that computer vision was the closest thing to what I had always thought AI research would be like. (So I did a PhD in computer vision.) On a related note, David Lowe, of SIFT fame, once related to me a story about when Isaac Asimov visited his research lab in the early 1980s and when they explained to him that computer vision was about enabling robots to see the world, Asimov shrugged and said he never realized that was even a problem -- he just assumed robots would be able to see.